Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Friday, November 14, 2008

Where's the Money? Ask Rahm Emanuel

Tim Carney is a fellow who should be sleeping with a pistol under his pillow. As I've mentioned before, if you really, really, really want to follow the money, Tim's likely to have written about it.

And if you think "crony capitalism" is the exclusive property of the Bushitler/Cheneyoil gang, you are very wrong. Matter of fact, Rahm Emanuel is a pretty good counter-example.

Emanuel left the Clinton White House in late 1998 with a job offer in hand from investment banker Wasserstein Perella & Co. Emanuel, with no experience outside of politics and no MBA, took a high perch as a managing director at Wasserstein Perella, and proceeded to get very rich.

Surely Emanuel’s work ethic, focus, and effectiveness were critical to his job success, but looking at the deals he worked on, it’s unarguable that government connections were what made him the best man for the job....One prototypical Emanuel client at Wasserstein Perella was Loral Space CEO Bernard Schwartz, a titan of the military-industrial complex. Schwartz was one of Clinton’s top two individual donors (giving the president more than $1 million in campaign contributions), and also beneficiary of Clinton’s executive decisions

When Rahm Emanuel entered the private sector and started looking for clients, Schwartz was among the first men he called. Schwartz hired him to execute some mergers or acquisitions

Hmmmm.

Another item:

But Bill Clinton’s Federal Communications Commission insisted that federal law required SBC to sell the security company. Clinton’s old right-hand man, Emanuel, happened to be working on behalf of a venture capital firm called GTCR Golder Rauner that wanted to buy SecurityLink from SBC. The government pressure helped Emanuel get his clients a good deal, as the Tribune tells the story:

“Under a regulatory deadline to divest itself of SecurityLink, SBC financed all but $100 million of GTCR’s $479 million purchase of the firm. Less than six months later, GTCR resold the company for $1 billion, earning a quick $500 million on its investment.”Nice work, when you can get it with a little help from your friends...